Nikto Web Scanner is an another good to have tool for any Linux administrator’s arsenal. It’s an Open source web scanner released under the GPL license, which is used to perform comprehensive tests on Web servers for multiple items including over 6500 potentially dangerous files/CGIs.

It’s written by Chris Solo and David Lodge for Vulnerability assessment, it checks for outdated versions over 1250 Web servers and over 270 version specific problems. It also scans and reports for outdated web server software and plugins.

Features of Nikto Web Scanner

Supports SSL

Supports full HTTP proxy

Supports text, HTML, XML and CSV to save reports.

Scan for multiple ports

Can scan on multiple servers by taking inputs from files like nmap output

Nikto Requirements

A system with basic Perl, Perl Modules, OpenSSL installation should enable Nikto to run. It has been thoroughly tested on Windows, Mac OSX and various Unix/Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, BackTrack, etc.

Installation of Nikto Web Scanner on Linux

Most of the today’s Linux systems comes with pre-installed Perl, Perl Modules, and OpenSSL packages. If not included, you can install them using the default system package manager utility called yum or apt-get.

The “Option host requires an argument” is clearly telling that we didn’t include the needed parameters while doing a test. So, we need to add a basic necessary parameter to do a test run.

Basic Testing

The basic scan requires a host that you want to target, by default it scans port 80 if nothing is specified. The host can either be a hostname or an IP Address of a system. You can specify a host using “-h” option.

For example, I want to do a scan on an IP 172.16.27.56 on TCP port 80.

The above command will perform a bunch of http requests (i.e. more than 2000 tests) on the web server.

Multiple Port Testing

You can also perform multiple ports scanning in the same session. To scan multiple ports on the same host, add “-p” [-port] option and specify the list of ports. Ports can be defined as a range (i.e., 80-443), or as a comma separated (i.e., 80,443). For example, I want to scan a ports 80 and 443 on the host 172.16.27.56.

Using a Proxy

Let’s say a system where Nikto is running only has access to the target host via an HTTP proxy, the test can still be performed using two different ways. One is using nikto.conf file and another way is to run directly from the command line.

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